Britney Spears has spoken out about her infamous 2007 head-shaving stunt, which saw the pop star give herself a buzzcut in front of approximately 70 photographers after leaving rehab.
The bizarre moment was among a series of breakdowns that ultimately landed Spears under a court-mandated conservatorship controlled by her father, Jamie Spears, in 2008. In November 2021, the “Toxic” singer was finally given back all of her legal rights.
Over 16 years since the incident, Spears, 41, has finally opened up – in her forthcoming memoir, The Woman in Me – about what drove her to shave her head.
“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up,” the “Oops!...I Did It Again” singer wrote in an excerpt published by People. “I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager. Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”
At the time, Spears was also in the middle of her divorce from ex-husband Kevin Federline while simultaneously fighting for custody over their two sons, Jayden and Sean.
In her 2019 documentary Britney Spears: Breaking Point, tattoo artist Emily Wynne-Hughes, who saw Spears immediately after she decided to shave her head, detailed the moment that occurred the evening after the singer left rehab in Tarzana, Los Angeles.
“[There was] an insane roaring sound outside,” Wynn-Hughed remembered. “I wasn’t sure what was happening, if there was a riot outside, and then the flashes came. The door opened slowly and a hooded figure walked in the door.”
Britney Spears— (Getty Images)
She continued: “I noticed [Britney’s] hair was gone. I remember asking her, ‘Why did you shave your head?’ And her answer was a bit weird. It was, you know, ‘I just don’t want anybody touching my head. I don’t want anyone touching my hair. I’m sick of people touching my hair’.”
Elsewhere in an excerpt of her memoir, which is said to “share her story at last”, Spears writes candidly about her controversial conservatorship, saying that it “stripped me of my womanhood”.
“I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilised that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself,” she said.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
Both the audio version and print version of The Woman in Me will be released on 24 October.
